POPULATION-CARIBBEAN: Managing Growth And the Brain Drain

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Wesley Ribbings

ORANGESTAD, Aruba, May 15 1998 (IPS) - Caribbean delegates here have been stressing the special requirements of the sub-region in the formulation of any wider regional policy to deal with the issue of population, reproductive health and poverty.

The subject has been a recurring feature of the discussions of the United Nations Economic Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Ad Hoc Committee on Population and Development meeting on progress since the 1994 Population and Development Conference held in Cairo, Egypt.

Monique Essed-Fernandes, Coordinating Director of Suriname’s Women and Development Project, told participants that there would need to be a revamping of the approach to compiling data on the issue of population and development before there is any indepth analysis of the situation in the Caribbean.

“We simply need more comprehensive data,” she said. She was at the time alluding to measuring the effects of “return migration” and the continuing brain drain in some territories.

ECLAC’s sub-regional director for the Caribbean, Len Ishmael, pointed participants of the current 27th Session of the Commission here to the fact that in Guyana, there is population loss in excess of three percent annually.

“In the aftermath of a series of structural adjustment programmes, the brain drain continues,” Ishmael said. “This has serious debilitating consequences for the country’s capacity to generate and manage growth.”

In the countries of Antigua and Barbuda and the British Virgin Islands, there is the problem of large numbers of nationals returning after living in other countries.

Ishmael said it is necessary to continue reviewing the implications of migration and labour movement in the Caribbean “and document the implications of return migration to the region with a view to assisting member states with their policy formulation as it relates to public investment in basic services.”

The issue is raised in a resolution being hammered out by delegates here in anticipation of a Latin American and Caribbean Report and Plan of Action to be prepared in time for next year’s Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly which will review the Programme of Action adopted by the Cairo Conference.

A draft of the resolution points out that regional and sub- regional organisations, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), promote a number of “priority issues” during the forthcoming biennium.

These include human resources training in the field of population, the census round for the year 2000, international migration, population information and education directed towards vulnerable groups, aging and the elderly, the family, social inequalities and vulnerable groups, including indigenous populations.